Conventional manufacturing of compact and video disks involves a number of discrete, time-intensive process steps. Laser beam recording of a prepared (spin-coated, soft baked) photoresist master is followed by "wet" solvent development of the pit information and "silvering" to allow optical inspection of the finished master. A nickel shell is grown directly on the finished master by electroplating or wet (electroless) nickeling. After separation from the master and cleaning, this nickel shell is matrixed to produce a family of nickel stampers that are used in an injection molding process to replicate polycarbonate compact disks. Vacuum deposition (sputtering or evaporation) of an aluminum reflector layer or electroless deposition of a silver reflector layer, lacquering with a protective varnish and label printing finish the process.
The conventional process for producing embossed optical media described above involves so many manipulative process steps that, even when individual step yields are quite high, the overall yield of satisfactory media (i.e., no errors, blemishes and other defects) is low because of the high number of steps in the total process sequence.
For this reason, there is a substantial need to reduce the number of manufacturing steps and the turn-around time needed to produce finished media. A particularly desirable way of accepting this would be to avoid the number of steps needed to make stampers from the photoresist master.